food, oh the joys

I've been a little cranky the past couple days. I am sure it's just PMS, but you know sometimes I just zap off emails pretty quickly and don't take the time to couch my words with gentleness. It's not that what I'm saying is not what I feel, or what I think is wise or right (as my opinion) but I know I could sometimes do better by being a little gentler in my wording. Sometimes I just don't feel like it. I'm not talking about my last blog about the slippery snakes of the intelligent design movement - that can stand. I mean emails to friends. I just get impatient sometimes. Sometimes it's just that I am in a hurry, or using my Blackberry which is kind of a pain in the butt to type on. But sometimes I just am like, whatever, this is what I think dangit! I never mean to hurt anyone's feelings. But I should also remember that we are all fragile flames, as Jewel says, and a little sensitivity is always a good thing.

So I've been cooking a good deal lately and all I have to say is it takes a lot of darn time to cook. And clean. And to warm things back up and put it back away in all the little Tupperware containers. And you think you're going to save money by planning all these meals and cooking from scratch but darnit if you don't end up paying out the wazoo for all the special ingredients you need, and even when you swear you're going to modify recipes and only use what you have on hand you STILL end up going to the grocery store every single bloody day. And I mean literally every single day for 2 weeks in a row! I'm either out of milk. Or fruit. Or soy milk. Or coffee. Or today it was wheat germ! Yes wheat germ, which I needed for a recipe to make homemade granola bars for the kids lunches. Well they didn't have wheat germ in bulk and the hell if I was going to spend $4 for a jar of wheat germ so I substituted wheat bran in the bulk section. Cost - $0.17. Not bad. But I think I've spent that extra $3 in gas money for all the grocery trips. Or $30! Oh and the point I was going to make is that it probably costs a lot less to just buy the darn $2.50 box of freaking granola bars by the time you add in the cost of all the ingredients and the time it takes me to cook and clean up! But the granola bars are pretty darn good at least.

Oh and then another problem with cooking is that the kids don't like most of these new recipes, though I think they're all divine. Or if one kid does, the other doesn't. So I end up with a refrigerator full of stuff that only I will eat! In my fridge right now, I've got a huge crock pot of tortilla soup, a cabbage-Granny Smith apple salad, and ginger soup, some black beans I made from scratch, and an eggplant-white bean-tomato salad with parsley pesto. Plus tonight I made Thai food. A quick recipe of rice noodles with peanut sauce with broccoli, snow peas and chicken. (yes I know I'm being a "bad vegetarian" - but the kids insist on meat, and I just cook it when they're here for the most part though I'm being about a 10% carnivore). Savie liked it, but Sam thought it was dee-skus-ting. So I made him noodles with just butter and parmesan cheese and he ate that but I said look you have to eat at least one piece of chicken. And you woulda thought I was subjecting the boy to some ritualized torture. The look on his face, and the way he chewed it, and how long it took him... I'm like just put the dang thing in your mouth and chew it and be done with it!!

Oh well, what can you do.